of the scene. He was dressed, as
in the morning, in plain black, but now the star of Louis shone on
his breast. His face was pale, but his eyes, with their swift-shifting
lights, lived upon Alixe, devoured her.

She paused for an instant.

"Thou shalt not commit--idolatry," he remarked in a low, cynical tone,
which the repressed feeling in his face and the terrible new earnestness
of his look belied.

She flushed a little, and continued: "Yet all the time I was true to
him, and what I felt concerning you he knew--I told him enough."

Suddenly there came into Doltaire's looks and manner an astounding
change. Both hands caught the chair-arm, his lips parted with a sort of
snarl, and his white teeth showed maliciously. It seemed as if, all at
once, the courtier, the flaneur, the man of breeding, had gone, and you
had before you the peasant, in a moment's palsy from the intensity of
his fury.

"A thousand hells for him!" he burst out in the rough patois of
Poictiers, and got to his feet. "You told him all, you confessed your
fluttering fears and desires to him, while you let me play upon those
ardent strings of feelings, that you might save him! You used me,
Tinoir Doltaire, son of a king, to further your amour with a bourgeois
Englishman! And he laughed in his sleeve, and soothed away those
dangerous influences of the magician. By the God of heaven, Robert Moray
and I have work to do! And you--you, with all the gifts of the perfect
courtesan--"

"Oh, shame! shame!" she said, breaking in.

"But I speak the truth. You berate me, but you used incomparable gifts
to hold me near you, and the same gifts to let me have no more of you
than would keep me. I thought you the most honest, the most heavenly of
women, and now--"

"Alas!" she interrupted, "what else could I have done? To draw the line
between your constant attention and my own necessity! Ah, I was but a
young girl; I had no friend to help me; he was condemned to die; I loved
him; I did not believe in you, not in ever so little. If I had said,
'You must not speak to me again,' you would have guessed my secret, and
all my purposes would have been defeated. So I had to go on; nor did I
think that it ever would cause you aught but a shock to your vanity."

He laughed hatefully. "My faith, but it has, shocked my vanity," he
answered. "And now take this for thinking on: Up to this point I
have pleaded with you, used persuasion, courted you with a humility
astonish